Weakly-supervised object localization aims to indicate the category as well as the scope of an object in an image given only the image-level labels. Most of the existing works are based on Class Activation Mapping (CAM) and endeavor to enlarge the discriminative area inside the activation map to perceive the whole object, yet ignore the co-occurrence confounder of the object and context (e.g., fish and water), which makes the model inspection hard to distinguish object boundaries. Besides, the use of CAM also brings a dilemma problem that the classification and localization always suffer from a performance gap and can not reach their highest accuracy simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a casual knowledge distillation method, dubbed KD-CI-CAM, to address these two under-explored issues in one go. More specifically, we tackle the co-occurrence context confounder problem via causal intervention (CI), which explores the causalities among image features, contexts, and categories to eliminate the biased object-context entanglement in the class activation maps. Based on the de-biased object feature, we additionally propose a multi-teacher causal distillation framework to balance the absorption of classification knowledge and localization knowledge during model training. Extensive experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of KD-CI-CAM in learning clear object boundaries from confounding contexts and addressing the dilemma problem between classification and localization performance.

The number of international benchmarking competitions is steadily increasing in various fields of machine learning (ML) research and practice. So far, however, little is known about the common practice as well as bottlenecks faced by the community in tackling the research questions posed. To shed light on the status quo of algorithm development in the specific field of biomedical imaging analysis, we designed an international survey that was issued to all participants of challenges conducted in conjunction with the IEEE ISBI 2021 and MICCAI 2021 conferences (80 competitions in total). The survey covered participants' expertise and working environments, their chosen strategies, as well as algorithm characteristics. A median of 72% challenge participants took part in the survey. According to our results, knowledge exchange was the primary incentive (70%) for participation, while the reception of prize money played only a minor role (16%). While a median of 80 working hours was spent on method development, a large portion of participants stated that they did not have enough time for method development (32%). 25% perceived the infrastructure to be a bottleneck. Overall, 94% of all solutions were deep learning-based. Of these, 84% were based on standard architectures. 43% of the respondents reported that the data samples (e.g., images) were too large to be processed at once. This was most commonly addressed by patch-based training (69%), downsampling (37%), and solving 3D analysis tasks as a series of 2D tasks. K-fold cross-validation on the training set was performed by only 37% of the participants and only 50% of the participants performed ensembling based on multiple identical models (61%) or heterogeneous models (39%). 48% of the respondents applied postprocessing steps.

Recently, density map regression-based methods have dominated in crowd counting owing to their excellent fitting ability on density distribution. However, further improvement tends to saturate mainly because of the confusing background noise and the large density variation. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchically Decoupled Network (HDNet) to solve the above two problems within a unified framework. Specifically, a background classification sub-task is decomposed from the density map prediction task, which is then assigned to a Density Decoupling Module (DDM) to exploit its highly discriminative ability. For the remaining foreground prediction sub-task, it is further hierarchically decomposed to several density-specific sub-tasks by the DDM, which are then solved by the regression-based experts in a Foreground Density Estimation Module (FDEM). Although the proposed strategy effectively reduces the hypothesis space so as to relieve the optimization for those task-specific experts, the high correlation of these sub-tasks are ignored. Therefore, we introduce three types of interaction strategies to unify the whole framework, which are Feature Interaction, Gradient Interaction, and Scale Interaction. Integrated with the above spirits, HDNet achieves state-of-the-art performance on several popular counting benchmarks.

Script event prediction aims to predict the subsequent event given the context. This requires the capability to infer the correlations between events. Recent works have attempted to improve event correlation reasoning by using pretrained language models and incorporating external knowledge~(e.g., discourse relations). Though promising results have been achieved, some challenges still remain. First, the pretrained language models adopted by current works ignore event-level knowledge, resulting in an inability to capture the correlations between events well. Second, modeling correlations between events with discourse relations is limited because it can only capture explicit correlations between events with discourse markers, and cannot capture many implicit correlations. To this end, we propose a novel generative approach for this task, in which a pretrained language model is fine-tuned with an event-centric pretraining objective and predicts the next event within a generative paradigm. Specifically, we first introduce a novel event-level blank infilling strategy as the learning objective to inject event-level knowledge into the pretrained language model, and then design a likelihood-based contrastive loss for fine-tuning the generative model. Instead of using an additional prediction layer, we perform prediction by using sequence likelihoods generated by the generative model. Our approach models correlations between events in a soft way without any external knowledge. The likelihood-based prediction eliminates the need to use additional networks to make predictions and is somewhat interpretable since it scores each word in the event. Experimental results on the multi-choice narrative cloze~(MCNC) task demonstrate that our approach achieves better results than other state-of-the-art baselines. Our code will be available at \url{https://github.com/zhufq00/mcnc}.

Systems for knowledge-intensive tasks such as open-domain question answering (QA) usually consist of two stages: efficient retrieval of relevant documents from a large corpus and detailed reading of the selected documents to generate answers. Retrievers and readers are usually modeled separately, which necessitates a cumbersome implementation and is hard to train and adapt in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we revisit this design and eschew the separate architecture and training in favor of a single Transformer that performs Retrieval as Attention (ReAtt), and end-to-end training solely based on supervision from the end QA task. We demonstrate for the first time that a single model trained end-to-end can achieve both competitive retrieval and QA performance, matching or slightly outperforming state-of-the-art separately trained retrievers and readers. Moreover, end-to-end adaptation significantly boosts its performance on out-of-domain datasets in both supervised and unsupervised settings, making our model a simple and adaptable solution for knowledge-intensive tasks. Code and models are available at https://github.com/jzbjyb/ReAtt.

Existing Cross Modal Hashing (CMH) methods are mainly designed for balanced data, while imbalanced data with long-tail distribution is more general in real-world. Several long-tail hashing methods have been proposed but they can not adapt for multi-modal data, due to the complex interplay between labels and individuality and commonality information of multi-modal data. Furthermore, CMH methods mostly mine the commonality of multi-modal data to learn hash codes, which may override tail labels encoded by the individuality of respective modalities. In this paper, we propose LtCMH (Long-tail CMH) to handle imbalanced multi-modal data. LtCMH firstly adopts auto-encoders to mine the individuality and commonality of different modalities by minimizing the dependency between the individuality of respective modalities and by enhancing the commonality of these modalities. Then it dynamically combines the individuality and commonality with direct features extracted from respective modalities to create meta features that enrich the representation of tail labels, and binaries meta features to generate hash codes. LtCMH significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on long-tail datasets and holds a better (or comparable) performance on datasets with balanced labels.

Recent years have witnessed great success in handling graph-related tasks with Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Despite their great academic success, Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) remain the primary workhorse for practical industrial applications. One reason for this academic-industrial gap is the neighborhood-fetching latency incurred by data dependency in GNNs, which make it hard to deploy for latency-sensitive applications that require fast inference. Conversely, without involving any feature aggregation, MLPs have no data dependency and infer much faster than GNNs, but their performance is less competitive. Motivated by these complementary strengths and weaknesses, we propose a Graph Self-Distillation on Neighborhood (GSDN) framework to reduce the gap between GNNs and MLPs. Specifically, the GSDN framework is based purely on MLPs, where structural information is only implicitly used as prior to guide knowledge self-distillation between the neighborhood and the target, substituting the explicit neighborhood information propagation as in GNNs. As a result, GSDN enjoys the benefits of graph topology-awareness in training but has no data dependency in inference. Extensive experiments have shown that the performance of vanilla MLPs can be greatly improved with self-distillation, e.g., GSDN improves over stand-alone MLPs by 15.54\% on average and outperforms the state-of-the-art GNNs on six datasets. Regarding inference speed, GSDN infers 75X-89X faster than existing GNNs and 16X-25X faster than other inference acceleration methods.

随着几个行业正在朝着建模大规模的3D虚拟世界迈进，因此需要根据3D内容的数量，质量和多样性来扩展的内容创建工具的需求变得显而易见。在我们的工作中，我们旨在训练Parterant 3D生成模型，以合成纹理网格，可以通过3D渲染引擎直接消耗，因此立即在下游应用中使用。 3D生成建模的先前工作要么缺少几何细节，因此在它们可以生成的网格拓扑中受到限制，通常不支持纹理，或者在合成过程中使用神经渲染器，这使得它们在常见的3D软件中使用。在这项工作中，我们介绍了GET3D，这是一种生成模型，该模型直接生成具有复杂拓扑，丰富几何细节和高保真纹理的显式纹理3D网格。我们在可区分的表面建模，可区分渲染以及2D生成对抗网络中桥接了最新成功，以从2D图像集合中训练我们的模型。 GET3D能够生成高质量的3D纹理网格，从汽车，椅子，动物，摩托车和人类角色到建筑物，对以前的方法进行了重大改进。

数据驱动的预测方法可以有效，准确地将蛋白质序列转化为生物活性结构，对于科学研究和治疗发展非常有价值。使用共同进化信息确定准确的折叠格局是现代蛋白质结构预测方法的成功基础。作为最新的状态，AlphaFold2显着提高了准确性，而无需进行明确的共同进化分析。然而，其性能仍然显示出对可用序列同源物的强烈依赖。我们研究了这种依赖性的原因，并提出了一种元生成模型Evogen，以弥补较差的MSA靶标的Alphafold2的表现不佳。 Evogen使我们能够通过降低搜索的MSA或生成虚拟MSA来操纵折叠景观，并帮助Alphafold2在低数据表方面准确地折叠，甚至通过单序预测来实现令人鼓舞的性能。能够用很少的MSA做出准确的预测，不仅可以更好地概括为孤儿序列的Alphafold2，而且使其在高通量应用程序中的使用民主化。此外，Evogen与AlphaFold2结合产生了一种概率结构生成方法，该方法可以探索蛋白质序列的替代构象，并且序列生成的任务意识可区分算法将使包括蛋白质设计在内的其他相关任务受益。

文本VQA旨在回答需要了解图像中文本提示的问题。尽管现有的文本VQA方法取得了长足的进步，但它们的性能仍遭受了人类标记的问题解答（QA）对不足。但是，我们观察到，通常在现有数据集中没有完全利用场景文本 - 每个图像中只有一小部分文本参与了带注释的QA活动。这导致大量有用的信息浪费。为了解决这种缺陷，我们开发了一种新方法来通过明确利用每个图像的场景上下文中可用的现有文本来生成高质量和多样化的质量质量对。具体而言，我们建议，TAG是一种文本感知的视觉问题 - 答案生成的结构，该结构学会使用多模式变压器来生成有意义且准确的QA样品。该体系结构通过将生成的QA对与初始培训数据相结合，从而利用了未充满激光的场景文本信息，并增强了文本VQA模型的场景理解。对两个众所周知的Text-VQA基准（TextVQA和ST-VQA）的广泛实验结果表明，我们提议的标签有效地扩大了训练数据，有助于提高文本VQA性能而无需额外的标签努力。此外，我们的模型优于预先通过大规模数据进行训练的最先进方法。代码将公开可用。